


to the end of the world if you wanted to

by amosanguis



Series: creature AUs [65]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Highlander Fusion, Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brief Graphic Description, Gen, Highlander Immortals, Immortals, M/M, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 14:18:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16306799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amosanguis/pseuds/amosanguis
Summary: After the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, Alex disappears and Ryan assumes the worst.In 2018, Shane doesn't remember anything before 1906 except playing on the shores of Lake Gitche Gumee as a child in the 1700s. He works for Buzzfeed now and a fan's just @'d him in a link to an article about an old photo album recently dug up--





	to the end of the world if you wanted to

**Author's Note:**

> \--Title from “End Up With You” by Carrie Underwood.  
> \--Lake Gitche Gumee is the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior.  
> \--In my mind, Ryan lives in the NYC apartment featured on Worth It with the panorama windows; he does not work for Buzzfeed in this.  
> \-- Author has no idea how the Buzzfeed building is set up.  
> \--Despite the Highlander tag, there's no need to have any knowledge of that fandom aside from this: there's The Game and Immortals who play take each others' heads (the only way to permanently kill another Immortal) for Reasons.

-z-

 

There’s a soft and distant rumbling that wakes Ryan, then the ground shakes and the floors give out beneath him and he thinks he screams.

 

-

 

Ryan screams until his throat is raw.

There’s a fire coming and he can hear panicked shouting and he doesn’t know if his rescuers will reach him in time because, Immortal or not, he doesn’t know if he’ll wake from being burned alive – or if he’ll even want to.

He just hopes that Alexander’s made it out – he’d had to work late and he’d been spending more and more nights at their small but well-respected tailor shop, hoping that if he put in more hours, his and Ryan’s (not-quite-recognized-by-American-laws) marital troubles would disappear.

And as he’s making his peace with his fate, sunlight pours in around him and a dozen hands are reaching down and pulling him up and up and up and _out_.

 

-

 

Alex isn’t on the streets and he’s not at any of the refugee sites.

So once Ryan has exhausted his search amongst the living, he climbs through mountains of the stinking and rotting dead, thinking that perhaps a fellow Immortal had taken advantage of the fires to take a head.

Except that Alex isn’t amongst the dead either.

He’s simply _gone_.

 

-x-

 

Shane gets the notification on a Friday – a fan’s @’d him and led him to an article about an old photo album that was uncovered during a construction project in San Francisco.

 

_Jem Guarneri @j_gua: oh my god, these pictures look just like @shalexandej! I wonder if they’re related and who the other guy is?_

 

Shane quirks an eyebrow at the tweet and before he can stop himself, he clicks the link and then he’s looking at an old and tattered photograph of himself, posing with another man with his hand on Shane’s shoulder and a quirk to his lips that hits Shane like a punch to the gut.

 

-

 

Shane knows that he can’t die.

He’s known it since 1906 when he woke up on the side of the road, listening to people screaming and fires burning. He’s known it since 1906 when he woke up on the side of the road and couldn’t remember his own name nor where he was – the one thing he did know was that there was no way man could construct such tall buildings, buildings of stone that were still burning and falling. he needed to get _home_. _Home_ was a simple trapping village near the shores of Lake Gitche Gumee and _home_ was where he needed to be.

He’s not sure how, things were still fuzzy even a hundred years later, but he’d found himself a horse and he’d ridden hard and fast away from the burning town, trying to outrun the smoke until he could find enough starlight to navigate by.

What he’d quickly found out on the road was that what little he remembered from his childhood wasn’t the same world he existed within now. For example, it was no longer 1755.

 

-

 

There was a two-hundred-year gap in his memories and Shane had had a hundred more years to come to terms with it.

The only reason he’d had a name to call himself by was from an inscription on a pocket watch that read:

 

 _For my dearest_  
_Here is to a hundred and more  
_ _A. S. Madej_

 

For all his time wondering his true name, Shane had taken the initials and made use of them as best he could – meaning, he made them up whenever he had to move. And sometimes, when sleep eluded him or he was deep into a bottle, he’d pull out the watch and run his fingers over it, tracing the letters and wondering who it was he had been  _dearest_ to.

Looking at the scans of the photographs now at his desk at Buzzfeed, Shane wonders at how he could ever forget the name resonating loud and true in his mind: _Ryan._

 

-x-

 

“Sir, there’s something you need to see.”

Ryan looks up from video file he’s editing, glaring over the rim of his glasses at his two assistants, TJ and Devon, who should’ve known better than to disturb him when a deadline was so close (and especially when that deadline was set by Spielberg himself).

But his assistants are rushing towards him and there’s panic on their faces and then TJ is thrusting a phone at him—

Spielberg’s deadline could wait.

 

-

 

“I want those photos,” Ryan says, his voice calm but stern, leaving no room for argument. “I want that article down and off the internet.”

TJ and Devon share a look with each other before Devon says, “Sir, I’ll see what I can do. But you should know that they’ve gone viral. An employee at Buzzfeed—”

“I don’t want any excuses,” Ryan snaps, turning away from the conversation.

“Ryan,” TJ says, his voice gentle in that way it always is when he thinks Ryan is being unreasonable, “there’s something you should know.”

TJ and Devon both were from a company that specialized in streamlining existence for the modern Immortal. They did publicity (or lack thereof for some), finances, maintained multitudes of false identities and paper trails, and, for a premium, corpse disposal of one’s latest head taken.

“What it is?” Ryan asks, exasperated and ready for this conversation to be over.

“The Buzzfeed employee, Shane Madej,” Devon cuts in, “he doesn’t just bear a remarkable resemblance to the other man in the photographs. Sir, I just got off the phone, and it’s been confirmed that Madej is an Immortal. Our company is working to get in touch with the Watchers to get his full history, but they’re always reluctant to share their files with us. It may be possible that Madej is—”

Ryan doesn’t hear the rest of what she says – not over the roaring in his ears and the feeling of the floor giving way beneath him. In that moment, he’s back in 1906 and he’s wandering the streets of San Francisco, calling Alex’s name and searching the space above the crowds for a too tall man.

When he comes back, his voice is raw and he can barely speak around the pain in his chest.

“My husband is dead,” he says. Then he turns and as he starts walking away, says, “Just please get my photographs back.”

 

-

 

Ryan doesn’t let himself break until his door has clicked softly closed behind him, his penthouse lit only by the city lights from below filtering in through his floor-to-ceiling windows. He leans back against the door and puts his face into his hands and he screams.

 

-

 

Hope and bitterness and rage all vie equally for Ryan’s attention throughout the night and by 3 am, Ryan can’t stand it anymore.

He gets out of bed and goes to his laptop and searches the internet for “Shane Madej Buzzfeed” – he’s not sure what he expected, but the slew of YouTube videos is nearly overwhelming. He ignores those and the social media links (Ryan never bothered with the likes of Twitter or Instagram or Facebook; opting instead to keep in touch with friends via text and email) and goes to the _images_ tab.

Over the long years, especially the earliest ones without his husband, Ryan had seen Alex’s face on almost every tall and white stranger. It’d gotten to the point where he’d stopped looking into the eyes of anyone with Alex’s silhouette.

And, scrolling through image after image, Shane is very nearly identical to his Alex, down to the moles and the way his hair fell and the way his smile could take up the entirety of his face.

It niggles at Ryan that Shane had his husband’s last name, too. There aren’t many Madejs in the United States. It could all be a coincidence. It could all be one big cosmic joke, maybe playing off the same one that encompassed Immortals as a whole – yeah, you can live forever, but some of y’all are gonna play a game that involves cutting each other’s heads off until the last one lives and, ho, don’t forget, there’s a prize at the end.

Ryan wasn’t interested.

But sitting there, surrounded by the dark – he wonders.

So he clicks back to the home page, clicks on the first YouTube link with a title about testing memory. Immediately he’s greeted by Shane’s face, donned with a pair of glasses, plopping onto a couch beside a woman. As soon as he speaks, Ryan _knows_ and he’s jerking back and away from his computer as if he’s being burned. Then—

“I know it’s funny coming from the amnesia guy, but I gotta ask: how reliable is short-term memory?”

 

-

 

That night, Ryan loses himself to a Buzzfeed spiral. Thankfully, plenty of other YouTube users have made helpful playlists titled “Funny Shane”, “Best of Shane”, and, Ryan’s personal favorite: “Videos Where Shane’s Talked About His Amnesia.”

From what Ryan’s gathered both from the videos and from sleuthing, Alex-slash-Shane’s cultivated a vague story about waking up in a hospital after an overseas accident and not remembering a thing about himself. He never goes into details and seems to swing wildly between being flippant about his amnesia and shutting down when asked directly about it (the latter seemingly only done by strangers on the internet).

There is one video, where Shane and his friends get drunk in order to test a hangover cure the next morning.

At one point, there’s a brief pause in the music and, for a second, Shane is staring (almost angrily) down at something in his hands, something glinting in the light of the streetlamp, but Shane pockets it as soon as he notices the camera on him.

Quickly, Ryan rewinds the video and pauses it, rewinds and pauses it again and again – searching for a good angle to see what was in Shane’s hands. But even without that angle, Ryan has a feeling he knows what Shane’s looking at.

The pocket watch had been a gift to celebrate their hundredth anniversary. It’d been funny to Ryan at the time because what was time anyway to men who can’t die? Looking back on it in the years after 1906, Ryan realizes he should’ve _known_ better, should’ve _done_ better, should’ve _been_ better – he’d taken Alexander and their time together for granted. He’d laughed in the face of Fate, and she’d struck back with a vengeance.

As dawn breaks over the buildings that surround him, Ryan decides it’s a wrong it was time to right.

 

-

 

Devon and TJ both make the trip to Los Angeles with Ryan, making arrangements and coordinating both with their company and with the Watchers on where Shane could most likely be found alone and a “chance” meeting could happen. It’s an almost constant back and forth before Ryan finally just snaps that he wants Shane’s telephone number.

Hesitantly, TJ hands it over.

 

-x-

 

Shane is alternating between blankly staring at a wall and furiously scribbling on a large legal pad – trying desperately to write down each new memory as it comes to him, just in case he forgets it again. He thinks it’d be faster to type, but it was too strange a feeling to be using a computer as he thought about he and Ryan grinning stupidly at each other from across the stagecoach as they made their way to the western coast, searching for gold and their next adventure.

A few coworkers try to stop by his desk, but he chases them all off with a warning look he refuses to feel bad about. He knows they want to ask – not just about him using a pencil and paper, but also about the pictures he’s got pulled up on his screen and the pocket watch sitting almost innocently beside his mouse.

He’s so engrossed that he doesn’t notice his phone buzzing at his elbow the first, second, or third time.

What he does notice is the soft feeling of electricity tingling at the back of his neck – a warning that there was an Immortal nearby. He fights off his instinct to run – here in the middle of the bustling Buzzfeed bullpen, he was perfectly safe – no Immortal in their right mind would dare to Challenge him here.

But then an intern is at his elbow, saying that he’s got someone here to see him and that no, it can’t wait. Then, “He kinda looks like that guy,” the intern says, pointing at Shane’s screen.

It takes a beat for Shane to fully process the words and the pointing – but as soon as he gets it, he’s out of his seat like a shot.

The tingling, that little jolt of electricity now seems like a pull – he’s being dragged to someone and he’s all too willing to go. His long legs eat up the ground and he forgoes the elevator for the stairs down to the ground, racing out to the lobby.

They say the world is supposed to slow down during moments like these – everything’s supposed to stop or fade away as soon as their eyes meet or whatever. Instead, when Shane sees Ryan, it’s like everything’s moving too fast.

Ryan is dressed in a nice suit and he’s not quite facing Shane, but Shane still somehow sees all of him all at once, the very sight of him clearing away whatever fog was left that’d been hanging over his memories.

He must say something then, because Ryan is suddenly facing him – he looks drained and exhausted and— _god_ , this whole time, he must’ve thought Shane dead. A whole century stolen from them and Shane’s not sure how they’ll get it back until, with a whisper, Ryan breathes, “Alexander. _Alex_ —” and then he’s taking a step backwards.

Something about the movement suddenly kicks Shane into action because then he’s running forward, and he doesn’t stop until his arms are around Ryan.

“I’m sorry, fuck, I’m sorry,” he says, over and over, a never-ending stream of words said into Ryan’s hair. “I don’t know what happened, I woke up and everything was wrong—goddammit, Ry, I don’t how I forgot you, forgot us—we’ve lost so much—”

And then Ryan’s cutting him off with a brutal kiss, something that burns beautifully through him, settling him in ways he hadn’t realized needed settling.

It was like finally coming home.

 

-x-

 

Ryan has him back – _finally_ – after so long apart, Ryan has Alexander back. Except _Alex_ is _Shane_ now, and _Shane_ , while he talks and looks and smells like _Alex_ , they are not the same person. There’s a hundred years between them that they have to navigate.

This time, though, Ryan swears, as he pours he and Shane a glass of good wine, this time Ryan swears he’s not going to take it for granted.

 

-z-

 

End.


End file.
